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“The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting intentions.” — Craig Mod

The New York Times says print is far from dead, and Craig Mod asks if digital books will ever replace print. After a torrid but brief love affair, I admit that I have been reading less on the Kindle and succumbing more to the allure of physical books. I still use the Kindle for throwaway books, travel, library books, and sampling. I think it is a terrific tool that has its uses, but it is not a replacement for books as objects. When I catalog my reads, I always categorize Kindle books as “read but unowned,” because books on the Kindle do not feel like they are really mine.

It would be nice to build the equivalent of a Little Free Library using e-books, but giving the restrictions placed upon them by publishers, that doesn’t seem likely. Fortunately, paper books will be with us for a long time. Just because I have and enjoy a Kindle doesn’t stop me from buying paper books. My urge to share books, as well as to support community meeting places like our local bookstore, also keeps me buying them.

Like this:

Laura Miller has a great article called Spamazon at Salon.com, which explains how e-book spam is clogging the Kindle. I was toying with the idea of getting an e-book reader, maybe for Christmas, but this new development is enough to put me right off of it.

It seems that these e-book spam operators are repurchasing cheap content, or are stealing the content outright, and posting them on the Kindle store as 99-cent e-books. Even worse, the same content may be repackaged into several different e-books with slightly different titles or publisher names. Often, this content is the product of content farms like eHow.com, and therefore not even worth almost a buck to buy, but the low price may lead to impulse purchases.

All this spam should make it hard for readers to find legitimate books worthy of spending their money on, which makes self-publishing e-books a dicey proposition. It will probably disillusion many readers, like me, from even considering purchasing e-books. And of course, writers are getting ripped off again, as they find plagiarized versions of their content bobbing in the spam soup.

I have to wonder why people are so quick to fill everything up with garbage. Amazon doesn’t seem willing to clean up its own store. Until it does, though, I won’t be investing in a Kindle.

I see that yet another pundit is predicting the death of the physical book. His argument seems to be that books will go the same way as music and movies and become completely digitized. Well, I say that person does not understand that people interact with books in very different ways than they do with music and movies.

Book lovers enjoy doing two things with their books after they have finished reading them: displaying them and sharing them. Until e-books easily support these behaviors, the physical book will remain alive and kicking.

When I am finished reading a book, I may choose to do any of the following:

Put it on my bookshelf to be rediscovered by me or someone else years later.

Give it to a friend or family member to read.

Swap it in a book exchange.

Donate it to my library.

Sell it to a used bookstore.

Leave it somewhere for someone to pick up.

As far as I know, I can do none of these things with e-books.

Books have an aesthetic quality to them that goes beyond just the cover design. When I arrange my books on a shelf, I am making a statement about myself. I am showing what impacted me and what has value for me through the books I choose to display. It gives me pleasure to look at them and show them to others. Conversations are started. Sharing ensues.

And that’s the other thing about books: They contain information and ideas that want to get out there. That’s why their authors wrote them in the first place. Books are almost living things that need to move through the world. Confining them to an electronic device, and licensing them to only one reader, defeats their entire purpose.

People who claim that physical books are dead don’t love books in this way. They must not feel compelled to share them or display them. But there are plenty of people who do love books, and as long as they are buying them, I don’t think the book in its perfect, printed, 560-year-old form will vanish anytime soon.

Like this:

I have been following all of the conversations about the future of publishing, particularly with regard to e-books, going on over the past few months with interest. I thought I’d share some of the more interesting conversations I’ve found, as well as some of my still-nascent thoughts on the whole kerfuffle.

I have a bit of an inside view of publishing — 10 years out of date, but it’s not an industry that changes very quickly — and it’s not a positive one. I love books and writers, but publishing, as it exists today, seems like a necessary evil. It is too big, too cumbersome, too costly and too reluctant to change. Their business practices, which didn’t make any sense years ago, seem woefully out of date, wasteful and expensive today. The industry is ready for upstarts with new ideas to come in and turn things upside down.

When the world is changing around you, you either adapt or die. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know someone will come up with it. And that’s likely who we’ll be buying books from in the future.